Victor Cruz to have season-ending surgery for calf injury

On Monday, one day after the Giants suffered a loss to the New England Patriots, they endured another one.

So much for the fairy tale that was once dubbed "The Return."

There will be no Victor Cruz comeback in 2015. On Monday, one day after the Giants suffered a loss to the New England Patriots, they endured another one. Cruz announced in a video posted on Bleacher Report that he will have season-ending surgery on his nagging left calf.

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"This hurts because I worked so hard to come back," he said. "I fought hard, day in and day out. It's a tough thing to go through."

Cruz seemed to fight back tears throughout the video, which brought a disappointing end to a season that never got started. His comeback season had ended on Saturday, when he reinjured that bothersome calf, while attempting to run routes "at three-quarter speed" according to GM Jerry Reese.

According to the Giants, he suffered a "small tear of the medial gastrocnemius," the primary muscle in the calf. There is no timetable for the surgery.

"I feel very badly for Victor in terms of this one issue," said Giants coach Tom Coughlin. "Obviously the most difficult to get over the hump with.

He's going to have to get this taken care of and hopefully it will solve the issue and he can move forward and so can we."

"It's out of my control," Cruz said in the video. "Certain things just happen to your body that you can't explain."

Victor Cruz hasn’t played a down for the Giants in over a year, and he might never play for Big Blue again; his $9.9 million cap hit gives the Giants something to think about for 2016. (Alex Trautwig/Getty Images)

Cruz's body had been through so much already. He spent most of the last offseason fighting to rehab the torn right knee patellar tendon that cut short his 2014, and at the start of training camp, things had seemed promising.

But the magical return was an illusion. All along, Cruz saw limited reps. And in mid-August, just as the team was preparing to ramp up the intensity, he first suffered the calf strain. He never went through a full practice in 2015.

"There was a play or two here or there when we went out to Cincinnati (for joint practices with the Bengals), but it wasn't much," said receivers coach Sean Ryan, when asked if Cruz was ever went 100% in during his attempted return. "I think we split two reps out of two, so we never really got going with the whole thing. It never really got to that, certainly not to the extent that we had hoped for."

Now, the Giants don't know what to hope. Cruz will be 30 next season, five years removed from his magical breakout of 2011, four years removed from his last 1,000-yard season, with three surgeries (late-season knee surgery in 2013, patellar repair last year and this upcoming calf surgery) in his medical file.

That's a shaky resume for a player with three years and $24 million left on the big-money deal he signed in 2013. Cruz will count $9.9 million against next year's cap, but the Giants can save $6.1 million if they cut him in March. Cruz could renegotiate his deal, taking a pay cut. Reese provided no indication of anything Monday.

"I'm not going to talk about that right now," he said. "That will take care of itself when the time comes. Right now, we'll just try to focus on the last six games. That's a long way off."

And it's impossible to tell whether Cruz will find his old form after two years out of football.

"Yeah, who knows?" Reese said. "When you're gone for a couple of years like that, you just can't jump back in and play, I don't think . . . I don't think it's an easy road back, but I know how hard he works and how hard he worked in getting back from the patella injury. We'll see where it goes."

Coughlin said he "thinks" Cruz can come back, but nothing's certain.

"I think we'll have to have some medical opinions about what's happening here," he said. "Hopefully there will be some good answers."

Cruz just hopes everyone gives him one more chance to prove he still has it.

"I hope you don't lose faith in me," he said in his video, "because I haven't lost faith in myself."